That Wednesday began the way it was supposed to. Gwen Woods got out of bed an hour before sunrise, showered, and dressed for work. As she was leaving the house, her phone rang. “God morning,” she greeted Mario, her youngest son. “God morning,” he replied.

Since 2008, her hourly pay had risen $2. After adjusting for inflation, that equaled a ten-cent raise over ten years. She thought about how the price of bread, eyeglasses, and health care had risen. “No wonder I couldn’t come up with rent on the first,” she said. “There were things that had changed, but I didn’t realize it.”

McGinn would not get a conviction; the jurors would deadlock on the verdict for both officers. But over the next 18 months, McGinn would try to lay out a blueprint for holding cops publicly accountable for fatal shootings—and she would experience, firsthand, why they were virtually impossible to prosecute.

Jaeah was previously a staff reporter at Mother Jones, where she covered policing after Ferguson, and wrote about criminal justice, income inequality, and race, among other subjects. Her work has been featured in major national outlets including The Atlantic, Guardian, Huffington Post, Wired, Christian Science Monitor, Global Post, MSNBC, and Democracy Now. As a 2013-14 Middlebury College Environmental Journalism Fellow, Jaeah spent a year investigating China's emerging fracking industry and its ties to international oil companies, which led to a feature story in print and a multimedia package online. In a former life, she researched and wrote about China at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Jaeah's work has won awards from the Online News Association and Society of Professional Journalists, and named a finalist in the National Magazine Awards and Data Journalism Awards. She's spoken at conferences including the Investigative Reporters and Editors, Asian American Journalists Association, National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, and Exceptional Women in Publishing.

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Archiving the Internet in the Trump Era. The California Sunday Magazine, April 2017. Illustration by Ryan Melgar.

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